Project initiation

In designing custom professional development, we start by listening to your needs and goals. We’ll share Professional Development modules that we’ve developed and will customize them to support your goals. We will work closely with you to determine the scope and direction of the project. We will have face-to-face and virtual planning sessions with your organization’s project team to reconfirm your project’s objectives and to talk through the project timetable and any operational issues and logistics.

The output of our discussions will be a Scope of Work, which details Professional Development goals, describes roles and responsibilities, and outlines a draft program-at-a-glance. Once approved by your organization’s representative, it will serve as the overarching plan to guide our work.

Approach to Professional Development

Science House professional development is designed to deeply engage participants through facilitated large and small group discussions, body movement, hands-on investigations, quiet written reflection, and talking circles. In order to support and focus this engagement, we maintain high ratio of facilitators to participants. Our highly integrated work is based on group norms and depends on the full participation of the your organization’s community.

Typically, custom Professional Development begins by engaging distributed leadership teams from your organization in sustained and face-to-face Professional Development focused on the intersection of STEM, identity, and distributed leadership. It will be grounded in the Science House Framework for Access and Equity in STEM Education. Your participants will then experience a coherent sequence of selected Professional Development modules that have been customized for your specific goals. Note that some of our clients ask us to work with them on areas that are not related to STEM but rather about creating inclusive environments and/or cross-disciplinary integration.

Our overwhelming experience is that this deep engagement from our participants positively impacts their ability to creatively use Science House modules with their colleagues and/or in their teaching practice. Armed with a wealth of knowledge, tools, and an understanding of community responsibility, your leaders will engage in transformational processes in your organization and/or your educators will make significant changes in their practices—all focused on inclusive learning environments. They will adapt what they are learning and take actions relevant to your organizational contexts (e.g. location, demographics, history, related efforts).

Qualitative and Quantitative Evaluation

We take our commitment to outcome fidelity seriously and see our evaluation effortsas central to improving our professional development and its impact on your organization. We’ll use Daily Written Reflections to understand each participant and their learning needs. We'll also use a pre/post assessment called the KPA Scale Survey. We’ll analyze the findings, and present them to you in the form of an engaging, insightful and highly visual data display. We can also present findings through interactive workshops with principals, directors, cabinet and school board members, communities, and any other potential stakeholders.